Life, Fruit and Other things
by CheeseRelatedIncident
Summary: Finito, Complete and Tickety boo.
1. In which the unusual occurs

Disclaimer: The characters do not belong to me, but to Mr. Grant and Mr. Naylor

The words belong to the Oxford English Dictionary 

The Quagaars belong in Rimmer's unstable mind: they just came out for a sec to stretch their legs.****

A/N: This is really sort of a middle without a real beginning or end. It's unlikely ever to get a proper end but it might get a bit more middle if inspiration strikes.

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"Lister?"

A rather strange thing just happened."

Lister turned his blurry, mostly asleep face to his roommate. He got an unwanted view straight up the left nostril. Sighing, he forced himself to try and wake properly.

"What is it Rimmer? Skutters hold you up at gunpoint again, making whoop whoop noises?"

Rimmer appeared not to be listening. He looked vaguely stunned and slightly…odd. But Lister couldn't quite put his finger on the difference.

"A pod just landed from an adjacent dimension to ours. A bunch of warriors, vaguely resembling poultry, emerged and proclaimed that they were the Quagaars, a nomad alien race who wandered the dimensions selling their wares.

They offered me a body."

Unpleasant images coursed through Lister's head.

"You don't want that man, you don't know where it's been." He muttered.

Rimmer ignored him.

"They quoted some ludicrous price, but I beat them down to a sack of Fun-size Crunchies, a sock and that mug of mould you were cultivating on the bookshelf.

They seem to have a very complex monetary system.

Then they saluted, gave me the body and vanished in a rather cheap looking puff of smoke."

Rimmer blinked and looked at Lister properly for the first time. The "H" was missing from his forehead. He reached out and prodded the bunk, the sheets and a protesting Lister experimentally.

"Whoa, hang on, you mean that actually happened? The chicken brigade actually showed up and gave you a body?"

Lister pinched Rimmer's arm which he seemed strangely not to mind.

"And you sold my mould? That was a thriving, nearly intelligent life-form, man. I was gonna teach it to play chess."

But he didn't protest too strongly. Rimmer had a body? Aliens actually existed? It was all too weird for half-past ten in the morning.

He led the ex-hologram down to the vending machines for breakfast and ordered them two vindaloos with a side of chilli sauce. Rimmer absently consumed a few spoonfuls before undergoing a strange colour change and unlikely facial movements With an alarming wrench of the forehead he snapped out of his trance for the first time.

"This is unbelievable! _This _is disgusting…"

He ate some more.

"I have a real body! I can touch! I can feel! I can eat!"

Kryten rushed in with an anxious look, followed by the Cat.

"Sirs, I don't wish to alarm you, but there is a large asteroid zooming toward us on a collision course. Suggest you brace yourselves."

There was a long, loud crunching noise.After a pause Holly showed up on the screen, looking a little sheepish.

"Sorry, it just sort of …snuck up on me. Damage to the ship's systems minimal. Is everyone alright?"

Kryten, running a self diagnostic, checked over the Cat, who was bruised but otherwise uninjured and Lister, slightly concussed. Together they dragged away the stray pieces of shelving that had come loose and landed right on Rimmer. For a new body it had managed to grasp the fundamentals of bleeding rather well.

"There's a pattern here somewhere."

Rimmer gingerly touched the bandage that encircled his head like a friendly tapeworm. He had escaped lightly, all things considered, with a gashed and broken leg, a nasty head wound and one strange little scar, shaped exactly like a penguin, over his ribs.

"I achieve a small, modest degree of happiness- and something smegs it up."

" You're never satisfied are you, Rimmer? You're not dead anymore, and yes, so you hurt a bit now, but you'll heal in no time. Then you'll have to find something new to complain about."

Lister idly doodled on Rimmer's cast. Good job he wasn't paying attention; between Lister and the Cat's contributions the cast now contravened seven separate obscenity laws.

"What's that supposed to mean? If I have any complaints it's only because I always get the…"

"Bad breaks, yeah, I know, I know. We've heard it all before Rimmer."

Lister stretched and stood up.

"You're not leaving are you?"

Rimmer surprised himself with his force of feeling. But even trading insults with the Arch Nemesis of Personal Hygiene was preferable to staring at the ceiling while the skutters made rude gestures without even the decency to wait until he wasn't looking. Lister hadn't seemed to notice.

"There's still a couple of repairs to finish off. I'll be back later."

A lot later, in the middle of a marathon poker session which Kryten was winning suspiciously easily- that newly perfected cheat mode wasn't going to his head now was it?- Lister felt a twinge of guilt.

"Maybe we should check on Rimmer."

He was met with blank stares.

"Check on Goalpost Head? When you could be enjoying yourself? Have you still got that concussion?"

"If you wish, sir, of course. But I'm sure Mr Rimmer will be quite all right."

Lister did have a great hand. It was almost unbeatable.

"He's not Goalpost Head anymore. No "H"."

"Hey, man, he'll_ always_ be Goalpost Head."

Well. Maybe after this game.

Lister woke up, his morning headache, for once, not the result of over-indulgence. His thoughts drifted over yesterday. He ought to have remembered, he thought ruefully, that almost unbeatable meant beatable. 

Holly came on screen.

"Morning Dave."

"Morning Hol. No large chunks of rock sneaking up on us, today?"

"I'm at peak alertness today. Not even a pebble could get past m…agh!

Oh it's you Kryten." She blushed.

"Hi Kryten."

"Good morning, Mr Lister, sir. I brought back your laundry. Well the parts that didn't escape."

Lister jumped out of bed.

"Thanks, man."

He paused to look at the neat, folded bunk below his.

"How's Rimmer?"

Kryten frowned. There had been something subtly odd about the man this morning. He hadn't called Kryten novelty condom head once.

"He seems ok, sir. Adjusting to having a body again. When you've been dead that long certain things probably come as an unpleasant shock."

Being a mechanoid, Kryten didn't share the human distaste for some natural bodily functions, but he understood that this was an area that they were just plain weird about.

"I'd better go say hello."

Rimmer stared at the ceiling. Not all of it, just a patch on the left hand side of vision. He was giving this patch a nice long stare and then, when its excitement palled, he would switch to a wholly fresh area. He hoped it would have cracks.

He had been thinking about his conversation with Lister. The gimboid had been right of course, Rimmer was only too aware of his own destructive thought processes, but that didn't mean he couldn't resent it.

Still he was feeling different this morning. It _was_ good to have a body again, even a sore and temporarily disabled one. The cool feel of the sheets against his skin, the sensation of breathing in deeply, even that bloody itch down his cast, all were appreciated in a way they hadn't been before he had died.

Even that awkward business with the bedpan couldn't dim his sense of well-being. But, being Rimmer, he couldn't shake off the feeling that something would happen to spoil things. And, deep down, he was worried it would be self-inflicted.

"Hey, Rimmer, how's the new body?"

"Agonizing. So glad you could drop by Lister, make a hole in your packed schedule of slobbing, eating and slobbing some more."

"Well, you're such pleasant company."

Lister sat, unoffended, on the side of Rimmer's bed and offered him some grapes.

"The Cat only ate half."

"Where is the Cat anyway? And Kryten?"

"They're…busy. So, talk to me man, really. What's it like being alive again?"

Rimmer couldn't stop himself smiling.

"It's amazing." He admitted. "I'd forgotten how much realer things sounded, smelt."

He plucked one of the grapes and chewed it slowly.

"When you're made of light you feel…insubstantial. Impermanent. Remember when the holo-projection room was damaged and I kept losing bits?"

Lister snorted, remembering Rimmer's legs wandering forlornly through the corridors without the rest of him. He earned himself a glare.

"Yeah, that must have been * cough * very upsetting."

 He tried, unsuccessfully, to hide his smirk.

"Well, now I feel solid. Like a real person again. Permanent."

"But you aren't, not really. None of us are. Sooner or later, we all get turned into a million little worm desserts."

Rimmer raised an eyebrow. He was supposed to be the negative one, surely?

"What a delightful image. You should do talks on children's television."

Lister rubbed his aching head and continued.

"But that's ok, I mean, that's what makes it so good. We've only got this for a short amount of time. Better make good use of it."He sounded a little uncertain.

"So, if you had a chance at immortality…you'd say no?"

Rimmer knew _he _wouldn't. But being a hologram was close wasn't it? And he wouldn't go back to that, given the option. Lister was murmuring something to that effect.

"But that's immortality for the dead." Rimmer paused to think about the words coming out of his mouth, before continuing regardless.

"Would you accept an immortality for the truly alive?"

They both sat in thought for several minutes, surprised at the turn the conversation had taken. Lister threw a couple of grapes into his mouth to aid thought.

Rimmer sat up stiffly and, to Lister's astonishment, tried to do the same. His grape bounced off Lister's head and rolled out into the corridor.

"How do you do that?"

Lister stifled his mirth once again and demonstrated.

The Cat and Kryten came by a little later to a peculiar sight.

"Smeg. Smeg. Smeg. Okay one more time. Anything a half-witted chipmunk-face can do, I can damn well do."

"You've got to let your instincts guide your mouth. There you nearly had that one…Half-witted what?"

"It must be the way you throw it…here, try and catch this…oh."

"Look, I'll throw a couple of easy ones. There, man, you did it! He shoots, he scores!"

They turned guiltily as Kryten coughed in the doorway.

"Er, sir, if you remember you had agreed to go exploring on that planet we just passed. To search for supplies. Unless you would rather toss small bits of fruit around…"

"I'm just coming Kryten. Um, see you later Rimmer. I'll bring some more grapes, you're nearly out."

"Yeah. Bye."

Laying back, Rimmer picked a whole fresh patch of ceiling to stare at, a large one with flaky bits, that he'd been saving. 

Somehow, though, the thrill was gone.


	2. In which the usual goes right back to oc...

A few days, and twenty seven bunches of grapes, later, Rimmer felt as fit and mobile as anyone with a vast lump of illegally decorated plaster-of-paris stuck to their leg could be. Giving the Medi-bay a hearty two fingered salute goodbye, he limped awkwardly into the drive room, where an animated discussion seemed to be taking place.

"All I'm saying is, just because there's a huge, dangerous looking, swooshy vermilion spirally-thing only a couple of clicks away, it doesn't mean that we're going to get dragged into it."

"Get real, gerbil cheeks. Anything _that_ bizarre and perilous looking, has got to have us on its Christmas list!"

Kryten nodded anxiously, crinkling his forehead almost curved.

"I'm afraid the Cat has a point, Mr. Lister, sir. By my calculations we have a 99.879 percent chance of somehow being pulled off course and sucked horribly into its gaping, hungry maw."

"Oh God."

Rimmer, who had been frozen in a rictus of horror throughout this pleasant chat, finally thudded to the floor in a dead faint. The word "maw" was never involved in anything pleasant. Lister rolled his eyes at both Kryten and Rimmer simultaneously- which made him a little cross-eyed- while the Cat smiled with genuine joy. This was the sort of entertainment he needed to keep his mind off the spirally-thing. Dangerous, prone to looming and a colour that clashed with everything? he shuddered at the thought.

"Right." said Lister, as Rimmer came to and dragged himself onto a chair, "Listen. Holly's functioning normally, well…sort of…" Holly grinned vacantly. " all systems are bug free for once, even the fluffy dice boing up and down when you twang them. I'll say it again. We are totally, _totally_, safe."

With a smugly perfect sense of timing, a wave of extraordinary force rocked the Dwarf, sending the crew sprawling and sparks of various pretty colours to fly from the control panels. Holly appeared on the screen, splintered, reappeared swiftly in the forms of an Arabian camel, a small pink plastic toothpick, a half man, half biscuit and, for one hideous moment, Timmy Mallett before reassembling as Holly.

"Shock supernova hit by got! Squirrel. Course thrown off. Spiral weird heading toward the. Ouch."

She blinked rapidly.

"I feel like I've drunk an entire ocean of electronic Vodkas."

Rimmer pushed himself onto his elbows- attempting the chair again seemed like tempting fate just now. He was reminded painfully of his now physical form by a number of awkwardly placed bruises.

"So let me guess, gentlemen. This Supernova shockwave has sent us, not only way, _way_ off course, but directly into that delightful, sucky Spiral of Death thingy you were just discussing. Without me, I might add."

"Come on, Rimmer, we'd only just discovered it before you turned up. Anyway, we thought you were resting."

Rimmer snorted, something his nostrils were supernaturally good at. Kryten, meanwhile had made it to his feet and was checking out the instruments.

"Much as I hate to admit it, I'm afraid Mr. Rimmer is bang on the money. We appear to be locked in a direct collision course with the space anomaly. Permission to whimper slightly, sirs."

Inexorably, the battered red ship hurtled into the vermilion spiral. Anyone watching at that precise moment would feel the true meaning of the word eyesore. Inside the ship, the crew had mercifully blacked out, just before their molecules were ripped apart, dragged across space and time, and jammed back together again with all the delicacy of a football hooligan with a freakish excess of thumbs.

They woke slowly and by degrees.

Lister was filled with a sense of well-being. He couldn't remember for the moment who he was, or where he was but he felt that he was safe, cuddled up with his teddy, Bingle. Bingle was warm and comforting and oddly large. Also, he seemed to be made in parts of fabric and his fur was strangely curly and not quite as soft as usual…and he was muttering something about…soup?

Lister disentangled himself as Rimmer came to groggily, and less than happily. He had been having an extremely pleasant dream, until memories and then real life butted in. A little way off, Kryten jerked awake and the Cat stood up and stretched. Nobody seemed to be seriously hurt.

"Holly? Where are we?"

Holly blinked onto the screen with a more than usually baffled expression.

"We're not on any of the charts I have in my databases. I can't find us anywhere."

They gazed at the screen, which showed only a blackness filled with distant twinkly stars. There was nothing to distinguish it from the normal view from the ship.

"Cat? Can you smell anything?"

The Cat wrinkled his nose.

"Only Lister's armpits. Hang on." He shook his head decisively. "There isn't a solid object within miles from here- unless you count the contents of Laser Nostril's trousers."

Rimmer raked him with a contemptuous glance, then gave it a couple more rakes for effect. Sadly, the Cat completely ignored his best and most penetrating glare, leaving him with eyestrain and a vaguely silly feeling. He sighed.

"So we're in an uncharted area of space with no map, no knowledge of what's out there and no-one to ask for directions? Pretty much business as usual then."


	3. in which some more occurences occur

Thanks very much to everyone who's reviewed/ read so far. You're darn lovely.

A bit more then. Warnings as before…I don't know where I'm going, it's dark and I'm wearing sunglasses.( geeky ones, too)

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"Rimmer? Rimmer, you awake?"

"No."

Rimmer glared, but only out of habit. In truth, he had not slept much at all the last couple of nights, with his uncomfortable cast, widespread rainbow bruising- he had discovered an entirely new colour which he provisionally named "yuk"-, and worry over their uncertain location. Although nothing had precisely threatened them so far, he was a man who had been born with a feeling of impending doom and had clung to it, possessively. Lister provided a welcome distraction.

"I've been thinking about what happened. Maybe we didn't get transported anywhere at all."

"Of course. That whole spirally thing we passed through was merely a space bruise. Probably caused by some other ship banging into the infinite reaches of space a bit too hard."

Lister chewed his dreadlocks, ignoring Rimmer.

"Maybe it just messed with our minds, screwed up Holly's charts, made us _think_ we'd gone somewhere…"

Rimmer considered this. Lister had good intuition (something he would admit to out loud only under the influence of triple strength whisky or a number of magic mushrooms- just before the giraffes whipped out the handguns). And there _was_ a completely normal view from the ship, no external reason to believe that they had actually moved. But then the same thing applied to that little adventure with the Holly Hop drive- at least until they saw the parallel Red Dwarf. 

Rimmer shuddered at the memory-such a horrible, overbearing, clueless, charm-vacuum of a woman- if that was how he came across to the opposite sex, no wonder he had a dating problem. It was more of a mystery why the entire female population of humanity- when there was one- hadn't joined together to buy a sack and a few good, solid bricks, find a nice deep pool and make the universe a better place.

A grubby hand was waggling to and fro in front of his face. 

"Rimmer, Earth to Rimmer… have you rejoined the dead?"

Lister was mildly intrigued that Rimmer failed to ignite like a grumpy volcano at this little dig. Being alive seemed to agree with him.

"Well, ok, it's possible…there's a very tiny, miniscule, tiny, small, _teensy_, little sliver of a possibility- but what makes you think so?"

Lister chewed his hair again, less in thought this time than because he'd discovered a mini-reservoir of curry sauce.

"I don't know, man, it's just…something feels weird about this. It all seems faker than a yacht-load of game show hosts."

"And I believe I know why."

Kryten entered with breakfast and a worried look.

"I've been doing some research on woogly space thingies. If my theory is correct then we have been transported to a place of utter terror, a place of monsters, mutants and evil bikini women."           

"Evil bikini women?!"

Suddenly, Kryten had an attentive audience.

"Do you mean the women are evil, or they just wear nefarious clothing?"

"Er, sir…"

"Rimmer, don't be an idiot…they must be women in the _shape _of an evil bikini…"

"Um, I believe the salient point here, important though a discussion of misbehaving swimwear may be, is that we have entered …the 1950's Horror Movie Universe."

Kryten pulled a dramatic expression, one he was rather proud of. These subtle emotions were often hard to pull off in a face with that many angles. Sadly, it was not entirely appreciated by his audience who appeared to have entered obtuse mode. They gazed blankly at him.

"Kryten, what on Io are you drivelling on about?"

"Are you saying…what, we're _in_ a 1950's horror movie?"

Kryten reluctantly abandoned his Dramatic Face as it hampered his ability to speak.

"I'm saying, sirs, that we are in _all_ 1950's horror movies. Or at least in the same area of space. Every hubcap spacecraft, every alien with an unrealistic forehead, every radiation-mutated giant insect is out there…in this very universe."

"But…come on, Kryten, that's fiction…and really, really _bad_ fiction."

"All fiction originates somewhere, sirs. This is one pocket of it, a vast puddle of unreality made real- and at a discount price."

The Cat chose this moment of confused silence to swirl into the room. He combed for a few seconds.

"Listen, guys, there's something really _weird_ out there. I never smelled anything like it. Hey, does my collar look creased to you? Be brutal, I can handle it…Guys?"

Holly confirmed the news.

"We're being hailed by a ship that, from all appearances, seems to have been made from a Fairy liquid bottle."

They stared at the bizarre craft, wobbling beside them, suspended on ludicrously visible wires. 

"I think we should answer them, Dave. Their equipment appears to be more sophisticated than ours."

"We're outclassed by the squeegee people? Man, that sucks!" Cat licked his sleeve in embarrassment.

Lister shrugged.

"Put 'em online, Hol."


	4. in which the unreal unreels

The creature who appeared before them was surprisingly normal looking, if you discounted the shiny jumpsuit and the inflatable hairdo. He was male, blond and had a jaw which formed a perfect right angle – if Ace Rimmer and Dick Tracy had had a burning night of passion, this could have been the result. He was pursed, poised and posing. He was also, it became clear, about as sharp as a melted blancmange.

"Who are you? Why are.." he paused to flick his hair out of his eyes and lost his thread. "Er…who are you?"

"We're sort of …accidental visitors from another universe. We didn't actually mean to come here…"

"…_should have taken that left turn at Albuquerque_…" 

Lister raised an eyebrow. So Rimmer did watch cartoons? He'd have to get his opinion on Wilma Flintstone.

" ..got sucked in by this whirly thing, you know how it is…"

Kryten tutted. Honestly, humans made such straightforward things so complicated.

"Sirs, if you might permit me…Our ship was unwittingly forced through a transreality blur, a portal between the real and the unreal, which physicists theorise may be caused by the freak buffeting of a particular area of space, imparting a kind of increased sensitivity."

Lister and Rimmer worked this out silently and reached the surprising conclusion -space bruise?

On his proud vessel, Ace Tracy* had been listening with a fixed frown. His deep, world weary, blue eyes appeared to weigh up the situation. He scratched his geometrically breathtaking chin.

"…Huh?"

Further explanations were fortunately spared by the sudden arrival of an enemy vessel. A shiny saucer of wobbly menace, it crackled its own transmission onto Ace Tracy's other screen. Although smothered in static, the speaker appeared to be humanoid apart from the green papier mache head in the shape of a giant brain. It wore a purple collar, vast and pointy, on which it kept cutting its chin.

"So, Commander we -blast-  meet at last…and now -ouch- you shall _die_!"

The brain cackled hysterically for quite a while, pausing only to apply plasters.

"Prepare to be annihilated!"

The screen flicked off. The Commander gave one last wavering look towards the Dwarfers, considering some form of snappy, memorable response, then shrugged and turned with obvious relief to fighting the aliens, an area he was evidently more comfortable with.

"Prepare the laser cannons!" he yelled vigorously to an unseen sidekick, before remembering to switch off.

It was an entertaining battle. The Cat had produced popcorn from somewhere and they watched, enthralled, as the saucer and the squeezy bottle zapped coloured lines at each other. Rimmer insisted on rooting for the Green Brain People even though they were obviously the Bad Guys and therefore doomed. He saluted them, sadly and at length, as they disintegrated into a searing white blur.

They had passed over three planets, all three of which indicated dangerously high levels of radiation. One had been home to an ant so huge that they could not only see it from space but count –and scorch off- the hairs on its antennae. They didn't hang around to see what it felt about the partially bald look, though Holly, getting nostalgic, thought it was rather handsome. Later, lacking an immediate plan of action, they played a spot of cards. 

"So, Kryten…you said this is some kind of, what, fiction dump? No, hang on, you said fiction _originated_ here? That doesn't make sense."

Rimmer, surprisingly, backed him up.

"Look, surely a '50's film's dodgy effects would occur because of the available material, not just because in some universe far, far away that happens to be the 'in' look? Back in the twentieth century, film props, special effects, that type of thing, was primitive. Everything had to be done with glue, string and sellotape. And a bit of tinfoil to make it all 'futury'."

Rimmer waggled his hands in a 'futury' type way.

"Perhaps I phrased it badly. A universe like this one starts off as a sort of seed bearing plant. A mushroom ready to disgorge its spores. These seed are violently expulsed, projectile vomited through space and reality, where they home in on intelligent life forms…"

"Intelligent? The Monkeys? Boy, did those seeds spill on stony ground…Uh, do you have Mr. Bun The Baker?"

"We're playing poker, you addlebrained moggy."

"Right. So…Bakers are wild, yeah?"

"…uh…intelligent life forms, where they settle inside the brain and germinate. Most are choked at birth, but a few grow into fully fledged ideas, stories, creations with the potential for a tangible form. When fully grown the essence of the idea returns to its home universe, where it achieves that form, however tacky, badly designed or abhorrent to the laws of physics it may be.

"Royal Flush, sirs."

They digested Kryten's explanation in silence. Where they were was not, in any case, as important as, how did they leave? Planetary exploration would be no fun if the surface was overrun with monsters, with mutated insects, people and vegetables, with psychotic throbbing brains or body snatching pod-people. They could be zapped from the sky in the cross fire of a battle or as target practice for shiny-suited nutters with too many eyebrows.

Lister wasn't too concerned.

"Why can't we just go back through the Bruise? We drifted a little while we were out, but we can't be far away."

"But can we get through it from this side? Can we even find it?"

Rimmer on the other hand was sliding towards a panic attack, with a side order of tension headaches and heart palpitations. He had seen a lot of old movies and had far too much imagination when it came to things like tentacles.

"Holly?"

"Yeah, we should be able to get through it all right.  Easy peasy. It's a patch of weakened space; if you hit it at the right angle it just sort of, squishes open. But finding it could be tricky."

Rimmer breathed in, very deliberately. He'd thought it over.

"Holly, it's a large vermilion spiral. Even if you were wearing sunglasses in a darkened room and squinting, it would still stand out like Lister in a wine bar."

"Ah, on the other side, yeah, it's a big, bright vermilion, spirally thing. But on _this _side of space it's just…space coloured. Which makes finding it a bit like finding hay in a haystack."

An aura of gloom descended.

* Yes, I could have gone with Dick Rimmer, but I have an uneasy feeling that this somehow makes it NC-17 by suspicion.+

+ So, er, best not read this footnote


	5. In which the end is reached

Thank again to all reviewers/readers – (Lauren Scavenger, you have a very impressive page of fic, wow) and here, to my shock, is a conclusion.

A/N I know nothing about Telegraph poles-about as much as I know about physics- as will become obvious. Therefore even more of this section than usual is complete made up rubbish. Any telegraph pole fanciers out there- I hope your enjoyment is not impaired.

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"Rimmer, what is it with you and telegraph poles?"

Lister had been attempting to improve his literary skills and so was working his way through a pile of "Bunty"s he had found. The stories were getting to him (especially when the main character turned out to have been a ghost all along) but for an hour now he had been distractedly watching his roommate sort and file his vast collection of photographs, each pole seemingly identical to the untrained and completely un-bloody-interested eye. 

He received a dismissive grunt in reply.

"I mean I did compile a list of possibilities. Insanity was the front runner. Or a serious case of pole envy."

A growl.

"No, really, man, I'm serious. What's the attraction?"

It had been three days since they had passed into this universe. Holly had set a course nearly definitely for the approximate area of space where they had entered. Although several skirmishes had taken place, as well as one embarrassing incidence of wire entanglement, there had so far been only one_ really _threatening occurrence when a tall gentleman with a very thin moustache, calling himself Wallace the Well Wicked, had attempted to vapourise them for the crime of being in his general vicinity.  Fortunately, by the time Wallace had finished outlining his plans for their total destruction and his subsequent proposed take over of the entire universe- in an elaborate plot involving mind rays, nukes and lemon squeezers- the Dwarf crew had long since departed.

Things went back to nearly normal.

The Cat had very quickly grown bored of the new universe. His current project was attempting to nap in the weirdest places possible. This had the disadvantage that the others would be constantly opening the cupboard he happened to be in or tripping over him in the corridors (carefully pre-covered in dust sheets), disrupting his sleep and causing them to yell in increasingly inventive and angry tirades which the Cat simply tuned out. He was responding to an ancestral pull, an instinct deep within him. These monkeys had no sense of tradition. Also, they inexplicably failed to have shoe boxes large enough to sleep in. 

Kryten, when he wasn't tripping over the Cat, was preoccupied mainly with attempts to calculate the best way out of their predicament and with laundry. Rimmer's corporeal form had had the glorious side effect, as far as he was concerned, of vastly increasing the daily wash. He would spend blissful hours adding just the right amount of starch to a handkerchief or carefully ironing sock suspenders.

And Lister and Rimmer, the most anxious to get back home- Lister because of his barely still existing hope of reaching Earth, Rimmer because he was just generally anxious- covered up their fears with argument, hobbies and girl's comics.

"You really want to know?"

"Yes, I _really_ want to know."

Rimmer stretched, scratched his cast rather pointlessly and turned to Lister.

"You see this 1979 tall, flanged London Special? And this 19_80_ tall, flanged London Special?"

"Um. Yeah?"

"Do you see the difference?"

"Um. No."

Rimmer smiled.

"_I  _can."

Lister looked blank.

"When I was fifteen, not long after Idivorced my parents, I met a guy called Stokes. He used to let me do odd jobs around his place, top up the alimony. One day he showed me his pride and joy, his genuine 1982 Wallace Bacon Telegraph Pole. It was signed by the manufacturer. I wasn't too impressed at first. In fact I thought he was loonier than a Jacuzzi full of acid-dropping antelope, wearing bobble hats. I tried to make my excuses and leave. But before I could make it to the door, he pulled out a photograph.

"'What's that?' he asked. I looked at it. 'It's your telegraph pole…' , Stokes grinned at me, '…only with a slightly thicker base.'

"Stokes was astounded. Nobody had ever noticed the difference before. Soon, he had shown me his entire collection, pointing out the tiny differences in each one and challenging me to guess the year. I was a natural. Before long I was better than he was. It was such a great feeling being really good at something after years of abject failure.

Later that year, Stokes came home really drunk one night and…well, nobody knows the details but he was found dead the next morning, full of splinters, crushed by his own pole.

He'd left me his photograph collection in his will, and I've tried to add to it in his honour. And, well, that's the story really."

Rimmer shrug-coughed and awkwardly shuffled his 1960's. 

Lister wasn't sure what to say. He hadn't really expected a genuine answer. Rimmer had told him most of his life story, drunk or sober, but the time just before he joined the space corps was mostly a mystery. He was partly moved and partly concerned about just what exactly Stokes had been doing with his telegraph pole. Luckily, he was saved from responding by Holly's timely arrival.

"Uh, some good news and some bad news."

They exchanged glances.

"What's the good news, Hol?"

"We made it out of '50's world. Slipped right through this hole all of a sudden,  while I was trying to remember the words to "My way". 'Duh duh _der_… the final curtain…' "

"And the _bad_ news you cretinous bunch of pixels? 

"Er, well… we didn't slip through the _right_ hole."

They gathered together to work out the new development.

"Apparently, these bruises come in clusters, centring on one large area of sensitive space. There are probably any number of these things around us, only one of which will lead us back to our home universe."

The news was not greeted with enthusiasm.

"Man, there could anything out there" complained the Cat. "There could be…Rumple Fairies." He looked worried.

"Rumple Fairies." Rimmer knew he was going to regret asking.

"Back in Kitty School we heard stories. A bad little kitty might wake up one morning to find all of his clothes… horribly, horribly creased."

The Cat gulped with emotion.

"And the worst part was…they would never go smooth again. You could iron them forever and they'd still be creased. The Rumple Fairies had got 'em."

He shuddered.

"Fine. And now, if we shut the Cat back in his cupboard, preferably for ever, we could perhaps have a sensible discussion."

"Actually, Mr. Rimmer, he does have a point. Anything that can be and has been imagined, may be here. We've already seen 1950's Horrorverse. This could be a world of myths made flesh, or of cautionary tales, like the, er, Rumple Fairies."

"Or the Scissor Man."

Lister made scissoring motions by way of illustration.

"Me Gran always used to tell me, when I sucked my thumb, that this really tall skinny guy, with giant scissors for hands would come and lop both my thumbs off. She showed me a picture in a book, I was petrified for years."

"That's horrible, sir"

"Yeah. And when I reached puberty there was an even worse guy. He only needed one pair of scissors."

Rimmer, Lister and the Cat winced in unison as Holly flicked back onto the screen.

"Hang on, we've passed through another one. Oops and another. Blimey, look at that moon!"

They passed a vast crescent shape with a strange red surface on one side. The Cat sniffed.

"Edam. Slightly off, though, yeuch."

Lister, meanwhile, had had a thought.

"If we can pass through all these places, does that mean that they can too? The Green Brain Aliens could come into _our_ universe?"

"Or the Rumple Fairies?!"

"Theoretically, yes sir, it's perfectly possible. In practice however the immense shock of reality, outside of their artificial living conditions, cause most who are unfortunate enough to do so to die immediately. The few hardy enough to survive are probably the source of some of the wilder space tales, told in bars throughout the galaxies, by the thoroughly ratarsed. "

"Just a minute! The Quagaars! They must have crossed through from one of these fictionverses and survived. I _knew_ they couldn't be real."

"So…I created a race of Warrior Chickens?"

Rimmer was unsure whether to be proud of this achievement or not.

"Wait a second…wait a second…Oh, no, sorry,  it's a splash of curry sauce…no, hang on…Yes, this is it! Chaps, we are back in our own universe. Am I great or am I great?"

The view from the window showed an ugly, swooshy, spirally thing, gradually growing smaller. Whooping and hi-fiving ensued.

"Great, Hol. Now, let's get out of here quick, before we bump into anything else from Rimmer's mind."

The ship accelerated away, Lister's joy impaired slightly by the sudden pain of a crushing weight of plaster slamming onto his foot.

They were back home.

Epilogue 

Some way off, a small ship of Warrior-Merchants, small and pale, with a curious skin texture and a built-in phobia of tinfoil, were also zooming through space. They had been driven by a purpose, a deep and burning, if somewhat baffling need, to build a body- a little scuffed and with carelessly overdone nostrils, but otherwise serviceable- and to unite it with its dead lookalike, their creator. For a fee, obviously.

Now their purpose had been served and they were a little uncertain of the future.

Eventually they shrugged, as best they could, and carried on, scared and excited, on into the unknown.


End file.
